YOU COULDN'T EXACTLY call it a life-drawing class.
Better to call it anatomy for artists. After all, with the
exception of one art school regular, a buff fellow exuding muscular
health, the class' models weren't even alive. They were dead,
every last one of them, human cadavers chilled to ungodly temperatures,
wrapped in plastic and laid to uncertain rest on stainless steel
gurneys in a hospital lab.

An intrepid team of some 15 UA art students, led by prof Sheila
Pitt, penetrated the chilled spaces of the medical school's cadaver
lab this past summer to study the human body. The provocative
results of the students' artistic labors are now on view at the
university's Lionel Rombach Gallery, in a show slyly called Stilled
Life: Cadaver Studies. The art, a surprising compendium of
the gorgeous and the grisly, came out of three long weeks of work
in the lab.

From 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. each day, the students made drawings of
such things as the head and torso of a once-living man, the top
of his skull cleanly sliced off. They sketched a woman whose chest
had been carefully cut open to reveal muscle and sinew. In pencil
and in conte crayon, they copied random bones whose layers of
skin still clung on precariously; they replicated truncated feet
and hands half-dressed in flesh. One person made photographs.
Some became entranced by the strange room itself, its gurneys
row on row, each one holding a sterile bagged corpse. Even the
black-and-steel air ducts that pump out the odors of death made
their way into the drawings.

"It's hard to get into it, but then they really get into
it," says Pitt, who worked as a medical illustrator before
turning to fine art. "In the first week everybody was kind
of shy. In the second week they got into it and even became kind
of cavalier. In the third week, they were desperate! There was
so much they wanted to do." Back in the 1980s, with the
help of some doctor buddies, Pitt had spent six months drawing
in the cadaver lab, an experience she found "very useful"
to her own art. Last year she got permission from the medical
school to teach a class in summer, when medical classes aren't
in session. The class found an ally in the person of one Grant
Dahmer, who directs the med school's Willed Body Programs.

Dahmer, says Pitt, insists on a professional atmosphere in the
lab, where he always turned up for anatomy demos impeccably dressed
in tie and white lab coat, his long mane of white hair tamed by
a ponytail. (Several students did homage portraits of him.) Following
Dahmer's lead, says Pitt, the students conducted themselves "with
the utmost respect for the individuals who donated their bodies."
She says that no matter how much the students dressed up the corpses
in their imaginations (and they did), the real bodies were never
decorated or desecrated in any way.

THE STUDENTS' EXHIBITION is dramatic and sometimes shocking.
The works range in tenor from the grimly realistic, like Rachel
Rossman's grisly photograph of the sliced head (it looks startlingly
like a modern-day mummy), to the emotional likes of Karen G. Fisher's
mixed-media artist's book, which imagines a life history for a
dead woman she first met as a cold cadaver.

Each student had to make anatomical drawings from the live model,
who graciously braved the chill of the lab and allowed his naked
muscles to be labeled with a grease pen. (Fisher's charcoal and
graphite studies of the model, the only ones included in the show,
have a classic beauty.) Beyond that requirement, the students
could deal with their dead subjects as they chose, and that freedom
unleashed some hellish visions: chopped limbs portrayed as dancing
puppets, hearts and bones free-floating around dead flesh. The
artists seem to have divided into two camps, treating the whole
enterprise either with immense seriousness or with the kind of
gallows humor that gets medical students through their dissections.

The serious ones turned out finely crafted, sensitive drawings
of the dead that double as somber meditations on death. Jody Greer's
"Contemplation of Circulation" is a fine, even lovely,
pencil drawing of the corpse with the sawed-off skull. Mark A.
Seely, like a lot of others, was particularly struck by the faces
showing through the clear plastic of the body bags. In an untitled
pastel and charcoal, he's delicately rendered one of these aged
corpses. The figure is dramatically foreshortened, with its large
head at the base of the work, and its feet trailing off into the
empty distance. Somehow the detailed ear, finely wrinkled, palpably
reminds a viewer of the life that once animated the now still
flesh.

In the giddy camp is a wag by the name of Miko Peru, who painted
an imaginary comic book cover. His Scary Tales for Anatomists
gives a fair likeness of Dahmer squirting a wetting solution onto
a cadaver that's shriveled into a corpus beefus jerkus.
Rossman gave the smart-ass name "Palmolive Everafter"
to her otherwise compelling photograph of an old hand, spotted
with age. More nightmarish is Kristin Decker's "The Puppet,"
a conte drawing that imagines a weird compilation of bone and
flesh.

Emily Tellez travels with both camps. Her "Creature of Habit"
is a portrait of a young black man's face showing through the
body bag's clear plastic. It's deftly, even lovingly, rendered
in white strokes of the conte crayon over red, black and gray.
Yet Tellez's other works draw on the high-comic goulishness of
Mexican death art.

Her colored pencil drawing "Candy Man" depicts a fully
dissected corpse, his feet forward, body receding backwards, forlorn
penis lying inert. Clutched in Candy Man's intact hand is a gaily
colored lollipop; scattered around his sliced-up limbs are cruelly
ironic Lifesaver candies. Another work taps into the Mexican art
convention of twinning sex and death. It's a conte and charcoal
drawing of a headless female corpse who's sitting up in her gurney.
A string of pearls is draped over the gaping hole of her carved-up
chest, a red lipstick is in one hand. Its title: "All Dressed
Up and Nowhere to Go."

Stilled Life: Cadaver Studies continues through
Friday, September 19, in the Lionel Rombach Gallery just east
of the University of Arizona Museum of Art. Gallery hours are
10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday. For more information
call 621-5123.